The Sibyl of Faubourg Saint-Germain

There's a maze of backstreet alleys behind the main square in Avignon, in the opposite direction of the hotel. It's an area of narrow passageways and buildings that rise for only three or four stories. Medieval. More like Paris in 1830s than most of what I've seen in Paris. I liked it so much I kept going back, and each time I did, I found more places to walk.

Some streets curve like the webs of a spiral, others cross at sharp angles. It's like the Latin Quarter without its shouting fast food booths and all the clubs and bars. Like the Marias—but in both cases more extensive, the walled city in its natural habitat. Which isn't to say that it's not filled with little shops, but when I walked through during lunchtime many were shut and the streets were almost empty. That got my attention. I started thinking: These are the streets that belong in my book. This is more of what it felt like.

The arched walkways were especially spectacular, and the church spires shooting up above the rooftops. It used to be that the churches were the tallest buildings, that they dominated and defined the geography. I love it when all over Avignon the bells chime the hour.

I kept walking back over the same territory, finding new corners to turn, new curves. I really like the curves, the fact that everything isn't all at right angles. In fact, more of it is not at right angles than is. I like the way it curves away to the horizon, so to speak, so that you can't quite see all the way to where you want to see. It suggests a mystery almost, as if there's something to expect round the next bend. It's also very easy to become lost or disoriented. Which way is which? Where was I just a few moments ago? Victor Hugo talks about getting lost like that in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In it, his poet character, Pierre Gringoire, is following Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl, through the alleyways of Paris, somewhere near the Seine. But he has no idea where he is anymore, and Hugo complains loudly and with great wit about how confounding the streets of Paris are. My experience of getting lost the first day I was here was some small version of what he was writing about, except that in his day (which is the day of my book, of course), there were pockets where the maze was simply overwhelming, it seems.

I've shifted a few words in the opening line of my book, but the shift is seismic. If I keep it, it changes everything. It did read: If stones could weep, would they not weep for the dead of Père Lachaise? Now it reads: "If stones could weep, my Lady, would they not weep for the dead of Père Lachaise?"

The changes are visually subtle. I added quotes around the statement, that's the most important thing. I added quotes because now someone is saying it. And they're saying it to a woman who is being called "my Lady".... The speaker is Marie-Ann-Adélaïde Lenormand, the fortuneteller they called The Sibyl of Faubourg Saint-Germain.

She was the most famous fortune-teller of her day and is reputed to have foreseen the outcome of the French Revolution and predicted the downfall of Danton and the death of Robespierre. She read cards for Josephine and Napoleon and lived until 1843. I'm contemplating making her the "narrator" so to speak, a bit like the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights—but I'm still undecided about who she might be speaking to.

That's the question I most need to answer: with whom is the fortune teller speaking? Who is the woman she's calling "my lady"? Is it really a lady? Is it Tori? At first I thought she was speaking to a man, saying "Monsieur." My friend Toni thinks I should have a modern-day character in the opening and somehow slide back into a past that the fortune teller precipitates. I like that idea, but am not committed to it, or to anything at the moment. I'm waiting for some sort of impulse. Interestingly, the streets of Avignon stimulated my imagination and even now, thinking about them, my emotional connection to the story seems stronger and richer and more complex than it was. That's where I'm looking, to the emotional thread.